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20 Jul 2015

Papers worth reading

Hsu [pdf] examines water/air pollution from the hog CAFO system in the US, as well as market concentration. He establishes that large farms lobby for weak regulations to eliminate small farms. What would be the cost of complying with the Clean Water Act (over 40 years of exemptions)? About 30 cents 3 cents/kg. This outrageous environmental rip off probably applies in chicken and cow industries.

Hernández-Mora and Del Moral [pdf] give a critical examination to the establishment, operation and impact of water markets in Spain. They conclude that the markets serve elites over the public. This is a problem of governance, not markets, i.e., Part I vs Part II in my book. Pay attention to the "space" in which markets operate!

Coleman [pdf] finds that "oil companies send inconsistent messages to their two audiences -- warning regulators and reassuring investors." Surely there's some scope for regulators to pay attention to (or integrate) other information into their oversight?

Goeschl and Jarke [pdf] use experiments to examine HOW people trust others in exchanges. One pattern is to verify a few times to make sure the other is honest, before lapsing into trust without verification. These results match real-world examples such as spouses who cheat, auditors who fail to double check clients, teachers who trust "good students" etc. Countermeasures: renewed romance, rotation and random checks, respectively.

van den Bergh and Kemp [pdf] apply many economic ideas (path dependency, institutions, business cycles, etc.) to economic-social-political "transitions." I am going to use this paper for my growth & development class :)

Sinden, a law professor, gives a useful overview of the (mis)application of cost-benefit analysis in environmental regulations. This paper [pdf] discusses the environmental protection act. This one [pdf] reviews the US government's "dirgiste" approach to CBA. (She's working on another paper that measures the degree to which bureaucrats ignore "unquantifiable but important (to them) data" in a process that results in poor decisions.